“For more than 20 years now, growing up in Europe has equaled being a democratic citizen. That is symbolized by the act of going to the ballot box on election day every four or five year to vote for your representative in parliament. This is the same picture all over Europe – both in the EU and in their neighboring countries towards the East, the former Soviet Union.

But what about what takes place in between the visits to the ballot box? How do people act out democracy, enact their rights and help build a well functioning civil society? And what is the role of society's future, the young people, in all this? How are they acting out being democratic citizens? And how can we ensure that they will build a strong and well functioning democratic Europe in the future?

This training course, Youth participation outside the ballot box, will explore the role and possibilities of young Europeans when it comes to being active, democratic citizens outside the ballot box. It will be done by inviting organizations from 8 different countries from both Western and Eastern Europe. Through a training course the participants will be encouraged to investigate, explore, reflect and share their experiences, thoughts and tools of their daily work with young people in civil society. The participants will be challenged into thinking in innovative, creative and alternative ways of understanding activism, democracy, youth and the possibilities of both their local and national democratic realities. Different non-formal learning methods will be used to open the participant's eyes to the many different realities democracies in Europe are facing. The training course will take place from August 15th to the 22nd in Yerevan, Armenia and organizations from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia will take part.”

Our expectations of you as a participants will be that you are engaged in the project and that you can contribute to the reach the objectives of the seminar. We will therefore aim to select people with experience in doing projects and with motivation with regards to learning more about how to motivate young people to become active citizens. You do not need to have any specific educational level, as long as you have a reflected idea of participation and why to participate. We require that you are able to communicate in English on an high level .We will likewise aim to get an equal gender balance by having this in mind when selecting participants.